Cloudkill is amusing. Had one basically clear out almost the entire goblin fort just slowing rolling across the map. Also really should have brought Amiri to the Womb dungeon. Really missing cleave right now.

Romalar:

I also ran into a bug where the remove curse potion doesn’t always work, but a reload seems to fix it.

I had one where remove blindness scrolls didn’t work on a few of my characters (but it worked on others). The spell did work for the broken ones though.

One is that sometimes you actually have a -CON curse and not CON damage.

I found that one too, and eventually figured out the curse part and removed it. But for the issue I posted about it clearly said Con damage and not curse. Potions and scrolls work, but neither Lesser nor normal Restoration work (found diamond dust, doesn’t matter, can’t cast it - it just does nothing and doesn’t use up the spell).

@ShivaX read (and this makes sense) that with the really big, dangerous melee threats your high AC might or might not protect against that first attack in a round, but it helps a ton against second, third, etc. attacks (which all lose a stacking -5 off the base attack). So in the above, that Owlbear may only need a 5 to hit you, he needs a 10, then a 15, then if he has a 4th attack, it needs a natural 20 to hit. So you save yourself quite a bit of pain by having as high an AC as possible.

Hello everyone! Please, be aware that there are plot spoilers in the descriptions below (in the Quest, Areas and Kingdom sections)! Quests It was impossible to interact with Mim while being on top of "Talon Peak" area, so the quest couldn't be...

Hot Fix 1.09 just dropped.

I’m in the final Chapter 6 dungeon and I’m getting super frustrated by some of the fights. Partly (mostly) due to not having my normal party of characters I used most of the 70 hours as I lost some to … story events, due not not completing their quests (one of which was totally my fault slash intentional, but the other 3 were due to script errors causing me to not be able to). Of those, one of them is critical to my strategy so that sucked. I’ll keep at it, and hopefully we can still beat the game and such.

Reading the hot fix notes, I see at least one companion quest bug that directly caused me to lose access to Linzi was fixed. Sigh. I should have waited to play this. Ah well, nothing for it now. Scratch that, two of them fixed, and one for the aforementioned critical companion I desperately miss. Crap.

From the notes:

This hotfix happens to be a big one – more like a patch, in fact. A big and important feature comes live in this version: from now on, you can choose between different Kingdom region upgrades - which become available together with the new state of your capital, the city outfit.

Also relevant:

Finally, there is one more thing we at Owlcat wanted to talk to you about.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to the speed with which we solve newly-found issues - to be completely honest, it doesn’t leave us enough time to test all of the game thoroughly after each fix. It takes a whole week at minimum to test every aspect of our complex game, so delivering 2-3 hotfixes each week leaves our team only enough time to check fixes locally. Still, we know this is no excuse for issues that persist in the game, as well as those that are added with some of the fixes. Every bug report we receive literally tears us apart with the feeling of guilt for not finding and solving the issue before the game went live. As such, we want to be open with all you Pathfinders, so that you understand our philosophy and our current pipeline. Right now we feel it is more important to keep fixing critical issues as quickly as possible, rather than to stop releasing hotfixes for about 2 weeks and focus on a big patch.

Once we are sure all major problems have been addressed, we will get back to a more stable, “patch-oriented” development approach.

Thank you for your patience and your support! That is what keeps us alive and kicking.

You have a subsidy of 30, and then an income based on trade deals from cards (3 here), and then direct income (17 here). Direct income = sum of kingdom stat ranks, with each stat capped at economy (so that one is the most important). Then your direct income gets halved. Apparently the subsidy and tax are removed later in the game.

You are able to rank up kingdom stats per 20 stats by spending 14 days of your and an advisor’s time. I am able to level up to Rank 5 for a few of those stats, but haven’t had the time due to murderous beasts running around the kingdom.

It’s contributing 32 stats = 1.6 BP/week. Tallying up the cost of all those buildings, I think it comes out to 390 BP. This is a 243 week payoff time for this shit. Oh, and this isn’t considering the other sunken BP costs.

Go back up and look at my kingdom stats. If I tally up all my buildings across 5 territories, buildings are contributing 56 stats out of 445. Yeah. Building shit does nothing in comparison to successfully completing/savescumming kingdom card events.

It’s a 125 week payoff. But wait! It’s the second part of a chain, the first which already gave +2 BP/week. So it’s actually only a +2 for a 250 week payoff. That 1500 BP trading project? Best case with 9 territories and 3 towns is an 88 week payoff. Right now if I manage to get another territory (250BP) and upgrade another village to a town (50 BP), I can get 5+2x2+2=13/week for a 115 week payoff (excluding other costs).

And don’t get me started on the timesink of curse research that leaves you unable to respond to events. Though funnily enough, those sometimes have a better BP payoff than spending on buildings since they reward stats. The problem is opportunity cost of not having an advisor available to handle other shit that will pop up in the 60 days it takes. Other times, the stat rewards are worse than the buildings.

I’m fairly convinced that you never make your total BP investment back over the course of the game. Despite having no idea how long the game lasts.

Given this the optimal strategy if you happen to be lawful is to plunk down 9 bulletin boards in every town for +18 to event resolution rolls. Talk about engaging.

Not sure what you meant to type in that first part – but I have the impression that dissatisfaction is pretty widespread with the game.
But my answer will not be off topic, because it goes back to Tom’s original rant. When I first read his comments, I thought he was way off base. But that was when I was in Chapter 1, which, in my mind is a quite good despite some very aggravating flaws that I believe they can and will fix. The truth of Tom’s comments comes through in the Kingdom section of …

Wow. That is depressing. I will be turning this on auto the next time I play. I have been reading the Saxon Tales series and what this kingdom level gameplay needs are armies, garrisons and external threats that 6 dudes can’t handle.

For your main character? incredibly important. (edit - depending if you want to be good and persuasive, or even intimidating, which also uses CHR - if you don’t care and are just going to kill everything, playing it evil maybe for example, probably not that important).

@fdsaion That’s some good info, but I put this on auto last week and never looked back. It basically plays like Icewind Dale 2 with it off. I like it in theory, but I put over 60 hours into it before turning it off and I’m not missing it.

Also, why do people keep bad mouthing the archeologist? Are they crazy?

I haven’t heard anyone bad mouth the archaeologist, though I’ve never heard anyone say good things. In fact, I’ve heard no one talking about archaeologists until you, and didn’t even know they were in the game! :)

You can still roll a thief, just don’t dump CHR to like a 7 or something, keep it at a 10 maybe, and put a point in persuasion.

I’m stumped at the end game because I’m kind of angry about how things played out with the quests I was not even able to complete (some of which have since been fixed, but too late for me) and between that, me not having enough supplies in this place (and there is a vendor but she sells 0 supplies, like they have them in her inventory but it’s a 0 quantity for some reason, so I’m sort of screwed). I have two more rests in me, but I feel like a lot of map left to explore and the fights are just incredibly nonesense. I mean, it’s the last level, so I get it, but it’s wearing on my desire to keep pushing forward a little, I have to admit. I’d be fine if I could get more camping supplies, dammit.

I almost had another quest bug out on me but luckily when I reloaded and tried again it worked out. It is a main quest so I’m not sure if I could have continued.

I think my current quest is one of my favorites. I’m in the chapter after Season of Bloom. Something about the environments is just clicking with me. I’m either level 10 or 11 and things are still pretty much melting when my mob attacks them. I pretty much am still just having everyone attack the same enemy, but i will adjust some people if it is pathing them around enemies. I wish I didn’t reach my limit with RTwP. Maybe it would be better with a party of 4 and a difficulty that was tuned better.

For the most part I enjoy the writing and the characters, but I thought Chris Avalone was supposed to be one of the top notch writers. While good enough this doesn’t seem like top tier stuff and the characters lack something that bioware characters have (not the romance).

I wonder how an open world game would work with this system, with a better strategic layer on top of it. A big world to explore with maybe some type of overall story but which could be ignored. Have things happen in the world based on the conditions in the world instead of predefined quests. For example, there could be a kobold lair near a town. If left unchecked it becomes a greater menace and starts killing livestock, and then maybe townsfolk - which hurts the region’s economy, etc… Maybe eventually you can become the leader of a town and can raise a militia to send to the lair. Maybe you can choose to go there with a party yourself. Sort take some of the spirit of what Kingmaker does and expand upon it and make that part more of a proper game. I’m not sure if I’m wording all this clearly.

I wonder how an open world game would work with this system, with a better strategic layer on top of it. A big world to explore with maybe some type of overall story but which could be ignored. Have things happen in the world based on the conditions in the world instead of predefined quests. For example, there could be a kobold lair near a town. If left unchecked it becomes a greater menace and starts killing livestock, and then maybe townsfolk - which hurts the region’s economy, etc… Maybe eventually you can become the leader of a town and can raise a militia to send to the lair. Maybe you can choose to go there with a party yourself. Sort take some of the spirit of what Kingmaker does and expand upon it and make that part more of a proper game. I’m not sure if I’m wording all this clearly.